The Postcard Killings (2020)

Directed by: Danis Tanovic | 100 minutes | crime, drama | Actors: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Famke Janssen, Cush Jumbo, Joachim Król, Steven Mackintosh, Naomi Battrick, Ruairi O’Connor, Eva Röse, Lukas Loughran, Denis O’Hare, Dylan Devonald Smith, Sallie Harmsen, Pål Espen Kilstad, Orla O Rourke, Christopher Pizzey

We know him from the filmed thrillers ‘Kiss the Girls’ (1997) and ‘Along Came a Spider’ (2001) – both starring Morgan Freeman as forensic psychologist Dr. Alex Cross – and she is best known for her book series around the bold crime journalist Annika Bengtzon, which has been made into two feature films and a series of TV films. In 2010, the American thriller author James Patterson and his Swedish college Liza Marklund wrote the crime novel ‘The Postcard Killers’, published in Dutch under the title ‘Partnerruil’. The book topped The New York Times Bestseller List within a month of being released in English; Marklund was only the second Swedish author to achieve this. Who preceded her? Stieg “Millennium” Larsson, of course. Partly because of this connection with Larsson, according to Patterson, Hollywood studios also became interested in a film adaptation of the thriller and names such as Paul Greengrass (known for ‘Bloody Sunday’ (2002), the film series around Jason Bourne and ‘United 93’ and Gavin O’Connor ( ‘Pride and Glory’, 2008; ‘The Accountant’, 2016) circled around, but the production never got off the ground and floated around in ‘development hell’ for so long that the gentlemen gave up.

In 2020 ‘The Postcard Killings’ (note: a small adjustment in the title compared to the book) has been released after all. At the helm of the film was Danis Tanovic, the Bosnian director of ‘No Man’s Land’ (2001), the crushing war drama that earned him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. That should be fine, you would think. Especially since Tanovic has already shown with ‘No Man’s Land’ that he knows how to build tension. Unfortunately, as a viewer of ‘The Postcard Killings’ you will be disappointed. Because in addition to Marklund four (!) other screenwriters interfered with the script, it has become a mixed bag, in which the tension is hard to find. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays American detective Jacob Kanon. When we first meet him, he has just learned that his daughter and son-in-law were gruesomely murdered during their honeymoon in London. Tanovic found it necessary to fire the intense emotions he must be feeling at that moment – ​​anger, pain, sadness, despair, powerlessness – in a flashy artistic style. A trick that not only feels inappropriate, but that doesn’t come back anywhere else and is therefore in a sense a break in style (although you won’t know that until you’ve seen the rest of the film).

Jacob flies head over heels to London to see his daughter, identify it and, if it’s up to him, get in the way of local authorities with his unconventional investigative methods. Ex-wife Val (Famke Janssen, she too has succumbed to the botox unfortunately…) also stops by, but continues to languish in the most thankless role imaginable. The bodies of the newlyweds have been left in a shocking way: in a pose reminiscent of a well-known artwork hanging in a London museum. In addition, a number of body parts are missing and limbs of another victim have been replaced. Not long after the discovery in the British capital, bodies of young couples are also found in Munich and Stockholm and a double murder in Madrid is also linked to the case. A few days before the massacre, a local journalist always receives a postcard with an enigmatic sentence like ‘Till death do us part…’. And the bodies have always been artificially reconstructed into a well-known painting or sculpture. Kanon flies across Europe to help the local police without being asked. He is initially blunt with his British and Swedish colleagues, but the German near-retired Inspector Bublitz (Joachim Król) is happy to share all crucial information with him. The American columnist Dessie (Cush Jumbo) who lives and works in Sweden also receives a mysterious postcard and unintentionally becomes involved in the case.

In contrast to the novel, the different lines that are cast here (or actually there are only two) do not provide extra tension. There is only one moment in the entire 100-minute film that surprises the viewer. What also doesn’t really help to increase the tension is the fact that halfway through the film we already know who the perpetrator(s) is/are, after which the manhunt for these person(s) and the motive for the murders should keep us in the story. But by showing how the fork is in the stem after three quarters of an hour, the sting is pulled out of the film far too quickly. The average detective series on television – especially the quality series from Scandinavia and Great Britain – manage to extend the tension and intensity longer and more effectively. In addition, Kanon is actually not such a sympathetic figure. Of course you feel sorry for him that he loses his daughter in such a horrific way, but then he ‘elbows’ with a typical American megalomania right past his European colleagues, who in his eyes are not doing well because they feel too much stick to the rules. The unconventional camaraderie he builds up with Bublitz (typically German, somewhat colourless, with an eternal cigarette in his mouth) is perhaps a welcome light-heartedness on paper, but in practice it looks especially unbelievable.

Doesn’t ‘The Postcard Killings’ do anything good at all? Yes it is; finally we see a movie in which the characters just speak their own language. Not when they talk to Kanon of course, but with their colleagues among themselves. An international group has therefore been raked together, with a Dutch touch as well. In addition to Famke Janssen, we see two other compatriots in action: Sallie Harmsen and Dylan Devonald Smith. They now also speak Dutch intelligibly for once. The film was also shot on location as much as possible, in countries such as Germany, Sweden and Finland. It’s a shame that so much effort has been made to appear as believable as possible, but that the scenario has been completely snowed under!